Soylent Green: A Self-Consuming Dystopia
In accordance with my informal project of viewing those film
classics from the past that I have missed, I had a chance to view the 1973 film
“Soylent Green” today. It is a film that seemed to have made an impact back in
the 70s, and I remember that it was billed as a sociological thriller, one
which addressed important issues of that decade. The famous tag line was
familiar to me even as a child, and it seemed deliciously nauseating.
In this society, set in New York in the near future (2022),
we have a society that seems to have become more sordid and dysfunctional than
ever. The population of the city has ballooned to forty million, and one can
only imagine a similar growth in other areas. There is a general seediness, and
people are crammed into buildings, forced to live in stairwells and living what
would ostensibly be a routine that was governed by the pattern set in communist
societies. People spend all day in lines, waiting to receive their ration of
food and water. And the former (Soylent Green), consists of a bland wafer of
different colors, one which promises to deliver all the nutritional value
needed.
This is a world that reflects the concern that was evident
at the time with the threat of ecological devastation and overpopulation. This
was, after all, the period in which Paul Ehrlich’s famous book “The Population
Bomb” was published, and also, a few years after Rachel Carson’s “Silent
Spring”. It seemed to capture the fears that many had that our world was
bearing ahead on an unsustainable trajectory. This was the era in which the
ecological movement was born, when the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)
was established in order to monitor the contamination that accompanied modern
industrial society.
In this movie, the fears have come true, and we live in a
society of notable shortages. People are treated almost like a nuisance,
because of their overabundance, and we have a police state to control them. The
protagonist, a detective by the name of Thorn (Heston), lives in a very cramped
and dark apartment, a hovel, really, with a friend, a former detective and
scholar by the name of Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson). The elder man beguiles
the younger with tales of an unspoiled past in which people had a closer
connection with their world, in which nature had not been despoiled, and in
which people didn’t need to put up with heatwave conditions all year long
(ninety degrees at night).
This film is a murder mystery in which the demise of a rich
industrialist by the name of Simmonson is being investigated in a dogged
fashion by the Carlton Heston character. The industrialist lived in a
completely separate world, in a luxurious apartment with beautiful furniture
and running water. It seems like a vision of a magical world for the detective,
and there is also a beautiful woman who seems to represent a necessary
accouterment, another “piece of furniture”. She and other beautiful women are
treated as chattel by the rich men of this society, but this one seems much too
vulnerable and innocent, and awakens the interest of Thorn. (In an interesting
sidenote, he also seems to treat her as a disposable item, except when he
reveals a protective impulse that ends up seducing her.)
The murder consumes the detective, but we are able to see
how the powerful agents of order work to clamp down on this investigation when
he starts turning up dangerous incongruities and facts. The industrialist was a
lawyer who was on the board of the “Soylent” corporation, and he seems to have
had an overwhelming sense of guilt. He visited a priest a few days before his
murder, and he seems to have accepted his murder.
And what ensues is a pursuit in which Thorn follows all the
leads, using the brutal tactics of a police offer who doesn’t need to worry
about habeus corpus and barges into buildings and apartments without a search
warrant, brutalizing the inhabitants and he searches for new clues. And, of
course, he is pursued himself, and he knows it. What role does the bodyguard of
the late industrialist have to play?
One of the annoying elements of this film has to do with the
physical aspect of these people of the future. It is unsettling and rings false
to see people who would supposedly live in a state of desperation going about
clean-shaven (but with a little smudging added to their faces), people who in
addition seem to have perfect teeth and the “Hollywood” look of actors who
don’t look like normal people but instead like beautiful people without scars,
without physical imperfections, smooth-skinned, etc. The grime is not
convincing, nor is the fact that the population of this future metropolis is so
overwhelmingly Caucasian. There are a few African-American roles in this film,
and the bodyguard has an African-American woman as a lover/companion, but it
somehow doesn’t ring true unless we are lead to believe that segregation
continues to play a role in the future, and that this film was set in a
Caucasian neighborhood.
In the end, Sol Roth and his group of investigators find out
the truth with their own resources, and he, the faithful companion and father
figure for Thorn, decides to leave this world by entering into a euthanasia
center, leaving a short and unsentimental note for his friend. The building,
the attire of the attendants, the ceremony, the visual aids, the music, the
robes, everything in this center recalls the world of “Logan’s Run”, a science
fiction thriller that would be released a few years later. It is an antiseptic
vision of a future, and seems to reveal a contemporary vision of how a
futuristic society would look. Nothing like the grunge of the Alien movies, the
idea that grime would not magically disappear in the future.
Soylent Green is people, indeed. Cadavers are taken from
centers such as this one, and probably from many other supply points, and
ground and processed into a food that is fed back to the surviving population.
What I have to question is the following: why is food divested of its cultural
component? There is much, much more to food than merely the satisfaction of a
hunger instinct. Food is a ritual, it fills a psychological need, it is colored
by ceremonies that have to do with the preparation and the ritual consumption
of food in a group, in cafés, chewed and savored and appreciated for its
familiarity and for its sensory richness. Has all this disappeared in the
future, and can people really be satisfied eating multicolored Wheat Thins? Is
this a sign of the psychological barrenness of the future?
Also, the other element that disturbs me is the fact that
these people of the future seem to continue breeding wildly even in the face of
these demoralizing conditions, with so many out of work, dying in the streets,
living a life in queues, living in frustration. Are there no contraceptives
available in the future? Did the right-wingers of the Republican party triumph?
Why is it that so many people continue to be born, if not for the fact that the
population must forcibly live in conditions of extreme educational and cultural
neglect, with no memories of the developed world of the past. It seems a
dystopia about contemporary political realities as well, and in particular, it
seems to underscore the ferment that accompanied the legalization of abortion
in “Roe vs. Wade”, also in the early 70s. I might believe the Malthusian
proposition of geometric (highly accelerated) population growth, especially as
it accompanies technological growth, but we are lacking in the other factor
which accompanied this demographic trend in the West, which was the insertion
of this trend within an imperial matrix.
We had empires that were growing and were mobilizing new
resources. We had new industrial and economic trends that were leading to
growing urbanization, we had medicine and improved care, we had points of
expansion and vectors of movement. Here, we have an industrial society of the
future at a standstill, crammed into stairwells the way chickens are crammed
into sterile cages, bred to produce more and more and doomed to a very uncertain
future. Without having read the original Harry Harrison story, I am led to
speculate about the operation of other social and cultural factors in play
here.
This is a dystopia, however, and as always, one that seems
to revolve around a murder mystery. And it climaxes in a startling revelation
that will seem to make no impact in this future society. The terrible power of
these dystopias seems to revolve, as always, in the points of similarity with
our own society, and the projection of trends culminating in unsuspected ways,
in a repressive, dreary, static society that reflects our own hidden worries.
And it is precisely in this static quality, where the committed and ethical
individual is unable to have an impact and instead meets a tragic fate, that we
find the chilling power of these stories.
The United States of 2012, with ever-increasing wage
differentials, with a form of predatory late-Capitalism in operation, with
corporations buying elections and behaving with impunity, with a growing health
crisis signaled by an obesity crisis and a rising crest of cancer diagnosis and
an unstoppable process of global warming in play, and with growing social
anomie, seem to be a dystopia in the making as well. It is just a matter of
degree.
Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013
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